Customer Service in the Information Age
Over the past month, I have been buying a lot of stuff for my new apartment and getting settled. While most everything has gone smoothly, I have had to contact customer service a few times and I’ve been overall disappointed with how companies have handled my relatively small issues.
- Case 1: Oxo
I’m a big fan of Oxo products, so I purchased a rectangular step can for my kitchen. A couple weeks later, the step on the step can did not work very well, and I noticed it was missing a washer on the inside of the can. I tried to fix this problem on my own (via Home Depot), and then called Oxo to see if they could just send me the washer. They said they could not, because of liability reasons. I explained that the part was smaller than a penny, but they wanted me to send the whole thing back to them and they would send me a new one. I gave them my home address and email address (no credit card information or anything else).After the phone call, I realized it’s kind of silly to send it back to them when I can just bring it back to the store. So, I never opened the email containing the UPS shipping label and I ended up getting a SimpleHuman step can.
Guess what was sitting in front of my door a few days later?
Yes, that’s a brand new trash can.
Lesson: Carefully addressing the edge cases will save a lot of money, and make everyone happy.
- Case 2: Bank of America
I opened a joint Bank of America account with my mom before college. I didn’t know she was still on the account, so I was surprised to see her name appear on my checks when I got them. So, I went to Bank of America and asked them to take off her name. Guess what my checks look like now?
Lesson: Don’t always take the customer literally. Use common sense.
It seems that in-person customer service still far exceeds customer service on the Internet or via phone. I’ve had good success recently returning or exchanging goods from Linens ‘n Things and A.C. Moore. But, email communication and website support service representatives lag behind. They seem to only know about basic issues, and have scripted messages that they use. This is entirely backwards because people using the Internet to seek help have probably already used Google and have a more complicated issue.
While I hate adding another step to the customer service process, I think that customers should self-rate the severity level of their problem from 1 to 5 (1 being the most urgent or complicated). There are probably some problems with doing that (e.g. not enough customer service representatives that can handle the complicated issues), but I think it’s a step up. Speaking of that, does anyone want a step trash can?
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